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Can't go wrong with it!

I bought this about a year ago and it's so far being a reliable and problem free performer!AppearanceThe drive is about the size of the average paper back book so it's nice and compact. Both ends are fitted with a soft rubber padding that is about 3mm in length meaning that I would be very difficult to the drop the Hard Drive and have anything but the rubber hitting the floor so it's well protected. These rubber protectors are removable as they just slip on and off.

InstallationThe hard drive connects to a PC via a standard USB to printer USB cable and requires an external power source i.e. needs to plugged into a socket with the provided cable and is not powered by the USB connection. The installation was painless and on Windows 7 was just plug and play. Within a couple of minutes I was ready to start transferring files over.

SpeedTransfer speed is good although any restriction is likely to be down to the USB connection on the PC rather than anything else. Navigating between folders and opening files etc is just as quick as on my internal hard drive so there is no problem there.

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Not perfect but a great price

With my Macbook only containing a 250GB hard drive, I decided to purchase an external hard drive with massive space for as little as possible, to allow me to copy across films, music and pictures that would otherwise take up too much space on my laptop.

Recently external hard drive prices have plummeted recently and with this one available for £60 with a massive 1tb of space, I decided to snap one up.

The design isn't maybe as flash as other devices on the market, but I kind of like its rugged, simplistic design and with plastic covers on each end, it looks like it could take some serious damage before breaking.

The 1tb of space is massive and is more than I'll ever need but being as the price difference is so minimal between the 1tb and 500gb option it is definitely worth going for the larger one in the long run.

The disadvantages of this product is that it's quite noisy from the disk spinning and if watching a film off it, it can be quite distracting and annoying. Also it needs to be plugged into the wall during use due to its size meaning that you can't use it if you wanted to use it on a plane or train for example. Also it can get pretty hot when either copying things over or playing things off it.

Overall, at such a great price these small imperfections aren't that important.

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If you need an external hard drive then this is currently the best price/GB on Amazon

I purchased one of these for backing up photos and whatnot - I didn't have a copy of most of the files outside my PC and when it came to burning DVDs things just got messy and unorganized.

So yeah, I unpacked it a few hours ago, plugged it in (mini USB; common AC adapter) and set it up to copy things over for a few hours. I've been getting a 15.4MB/s transfer rate to the hard drive - which isn't the greatest of speeds but it's okay. You should be able to transfer about 50GB an hour at this rate.

Read speeds seem to be about twice the write speed.

The hard drive itself is pretty much inaudible which is good I guess. It also runs relatively cool when it comes to short use (30*c) but if you're transferring stuff on for hours on end the temperature very slowly creeps up to as much as 46*C - though it takes a long time.

Despite this the outer shell remains relatively cool on top - it does heat up a little on the bottom though.

In terms of design it looks quite nice. It's matte black on top but glossy around the edges - I see that scratching easily though.

On a final note I thought I'd mention that formatted this drive has a 913GB capacity - not quite a terrabyte but these things are always less than stated :P.

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A great HDD for those wanting alot of space at the cheapest price possible

Western Digital is known for producing high quality hard drives at competitive prices. At under £60 the 1TB Western Digital Elements external HDD is no exception to this rule.

The HDD itself is fairly sturdy, enclosed in a black metal casing with rubber ends at both sides. The advantage of this is that it is stackable, allowing you to have 2-3 HDDs place on top of each other.

It also comes equipped with a USB cable and a power adapter.

The HDD is USB 2.0 and 1.0 compatible which you'd expect with most HDDs now. It's also plug in play capable and having tested this on Windows XP and Windows 7 it works like a dream. It is also suitable to use with the PS3 provided it is formatted in FAT32.

The Good

For the price at just under £60 this HDD is one of the best value hard drives available to buy. Due to the advent of broadband internet and digital downloads there's no such thing as having too much space. Certainly with 1TB of storage space this HDD will take some time to fill completely. I personally use this HDD as a backup solution for my laptop. But it could equally be used to store music and films.

The HDD I find is quite quiet compared to my computer and while it can sometimes make audible clicks, for the most part it remains quiet.

I haven't encountered any issues with reliability since using this HDD for over a year and windows reports that the HDD still doesn't require to be defragmented.

The Bad

Like many of the other reviews have highlighted there is no on/off switch on the HDD. For the eco conscious this may not be particularly appealing, but when not in use it does go into sleep mode which is quite a smart function.

The weight of the HDD, at just over 1kg, makes it not the most portable external hard drive out there but at this price you can't really complain.

Finally the only other fault with this HDD is transfer speeds. I found that transferring multiple large files took longer than average. For a HDD of this size this may pose problems to those who will be continually transferring large files to and from the HDD.

Overall this hard drive is the perfect solution for someone wanting storage at a bargain price.

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Great cheap Hard disk

There was a time when a few mega bytes was enough storage for all your computing needs, that time is well and truly over. With the digitisation of music, pictures and video our hard-drives are becoming fuller faster than ever. However this isn't as much of a problem as it used to be as we have external hard-driver, these re-usable storage units can act like another hard-drive and also move data easily from one computer to another.

So what's special about this hard-drive? Well first it's dirt cheap to buy, I've seen them for under £60 which when you think about how much storage you get is incredible. Just to remind you a Terra-byte is 1000 Gigabytes, and a few years ago a typical internal hard-drive size would of being 80GB. So this product is perfect if you want to back up you movie, music or video collection, or move them to another computer.

This hard-drive connects via USB2 or USB1 and is fairly fast, but this probably has more to do with the transfer speeds supported by USB more than the Hard-drive. The Hard-drive does require an external power supply and does not have an on/off switch. The unit just is permanently on or off although when idle it does seem to go into a sleep mode. I can see why this may be a problem for some people but it doesn't bother me. There is no software that comes with this player it's simply plug-and-play, this means no automated back-ups, but in this price range and size find one that does.

The unit is quiet but does make a click noise if it was in idle mode and suddenly click something. This is fine as it sort of lets you know its doing something. The unit is fast enough to play media straight from it, but say if it's a video and you pause it when you press play the video will judder and freeze for a second, well at least with Windows media player and VLC player. This is a very reliable hard-drive as i have been using it daily for months and moved hundreds of GB to and from it.

This is a great hard-drive especially for its price and size. The lack of an on/off button and supporting software may be a minus but at this price who can complain. So you might as well buy three of these rather than one expensive one.

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A great disk for the price, just needs a few more frills!

Hard drives have massively dropped in price over the last few years and now the market is settling a bit more and price drops are slowing. The western digital elements 1tb hard drive is one of the few disks to drop below £70 and can be easily purchased from a number of different places including ebuyer, amazon, play and more.

I purchased my drive from amazon with some vouchers however I returned it within the 30 day returns period for a number of reasons...

the drive is very basic but well made, housed in a metal case with rubber surrounds at each end. Included in the box were the instructions, power adaptor and the USB cable.

I bought this product as a back up device for 750gb of data which I wanted to run automatically using software on the pc. After turning the device on and plugging it in I realised it has no on/off switch and seemed to run constantly when turned on. Spindown of the disk would reduce the electicity consumption and reduce the noise.

The transfer rate also didn't reflect my expectations when compared to other USB 2.0 hard drives. After reading a number of reviews about disk failures I decided to send it back and opt for something a bit more capable of what I was after.

This disk is great for people on a budget who want a simple device which will with patience back up or hold necessary files. If you want something a bit more useful with the ability to manage itself with cutting down power use and automated back up, you will need to spend a bit more.

Great drive, but just not suitable for my requirements.

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Excellent product, i would buy another but i think 3TB is enough for now

5 star piece of kit, easily.I have had only one problem, which is fragmentation. This, however, is nothing whatsoever to do with the drive. This is all Microsoft, and can easily be corrected with a number of different pieces of software.I would highly recommend this to anyone who is either looking for a quality external drive or good internal (as this is a sata drive).Very fast, i get around 24MB/s depending on the file.This is a vey reliable product, i have accidentally dropped it a couple of times, bit clumsy with wires and it got tugged off my desk. I am pleased to say that it keeps going, and never failing on me.The drive is also housed in a strong metal case with thick rubber ends, this both takes a good kicking and protects your nice coffe table from ugly scrtches.As for noise, the only time i notice it is when im either copyin multiple tings at once, so that is understandable when you think of what its actually doing, and when autoplay tries to determine what media it contains. Apart from that its very quiet.